


lucid

by dustofwarfare



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Dream!Sex, Is that a thing, M/M, Masturbation, Post-ACC, Post-Canon, Rivals, hate!dream!sex, it's cloud and sephiroth, so it's a thing, threatening sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 11:43:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20873648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustofwarfare/pseuds/dustofwarfare
Summary: For all their complicated history of violence and blood and pain, Cloud has never once dreamed of the man standing before him, backlit by the fire that is suddenly no longer just embers.---Cloud told Sephiroth to stay in his memories, but all Cloud's nightmares are just memories that have found their way into his dreams. So maybe he shouldn't be all that surprised when Sephiroth shows up there.





	lucid

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old fic that I found in my Gdocs, cleaned up a bit, and viola. Some weird Cloud/Sephiroth dream sex! It's not in any real continuity, other than the "Cloud senses his rival is back and will have to kill him again" kind. So you know. Business as usual.

For all the fantastic adventures he’s had in his life, Cloud’s dreams are relatively mundane. 

Missed deliveries, phones that won’t dial familiar numbers, walking downstairs in Seventh Heaven and finding it full of Turks. And Cloud in only a pair of chocobo-print underwear that he doesn’t even own. 

Anxiety dreams, the kind shared by people all over the planet. Even ones who didn’t go chasing a would-be god across the length and breadth of it. Normal dreams. Mundane ones. 

Of course he has nightmares. Aerith falling in the Forgotten City. Zack’s eyes losing the light as he bled out in the rain. Not so much nightmares, really, as memories intruding in the night. When he’s too vulnerable to chase them away. 

Every now and then, though, Cloud dreams about sex. 

He’s not celibate, but his assignations are brief and anonymous. Intimacy is something else, reserved for his comrades-in-arms, his fellow soldiers in their small, desperate army. Sex is sex, and he’s never let himself confuse the two. The potential for more nightmares seems far too great. 

Letting someone touch him, someone who _ knows _ him, is constantly avoided. A stranger doesn’t know what he’s afraid of.

His partners might be one-night stands he meets on his deliveries, left long before the sun rises...but Cloud’s dreams are always of Zack. His long-ago crush, the first boy who ever made Cloud want to kiss him. 

Sure, he’d had fantasies about Sephiroth when he was first aware of what fantasies were, but they weren’t the same. Cloud wanted to be like Sephiroth; strong, powerful, important. 

Cloud wanted to _ touch _ Zack. Wanted to run his hands over his muscled body, press his mouth to Zack’s, feel Zack’s big, swordsman’s hands on him. His crush had been as painful and lovely as anyone’s crush when they’re sixteen, and he never would have acted on it, ever, even if fate hadn’t trapped them in the path of a madman and a pair of mako tanks. 

But he does at night, sometimes. In the privacy of his dreams. It seems a small enough consolation, after everything he’s lost, to still have that.

Even if he wakes up alone, aching in the dark. 

***

Cloud is on his way back from a delivery to the Western continent. He’s sleeping outside, which he always likes, the stars bright and many above him, the breeze cool but not cold. Fenrir is parked next to his makeshift camp like a sentinel and Cloud falls asleep easily, more than he ever does back in Edge. He does not expect to dream. 

For a moment he doesn’t think he _ is _dreaming. Where before he was ensconced in warm blankets with the fire dying to embers, now he is standing, a sword in his hand, his breath ragged and too-fast. It’s not the sword he made himself, First Tsurugi; a pattern of disconnected blades he forged into one, symbolizing the different parts of himself that finally became a whole. 

This is the sword he used to cut Sephiroth down in the Northern Crater, the sword torn from the corpse of Ultimate Weapon in the dirt and dust just beyond Cosmo Canyon. 

Cloud left this sword in the crater where Sephiroth fell. It seemed appropriate; it came from the Planet’s weapon, and the Planet’s weapon came from the crater.

That blade gleams, trapped starlight in metal. 

“Hello, Cloud.” 

That voice is unmistakable. 

For all their complicated history of violence and blood and pain, Cloud has never once dreamed of the man standing before him, backlit by the fire that is suddenly no longer just embers. It rises up toward the sky like it did years before, when it engulfed Cloud’s home and turned his childhood into ash. 

“What are you doing here?” Cloud asks, warily. By rights the passage of time means the sword in his hand should feel unfamiliar, and yet. 

Sephiroth stares at him. He’s dressed like he was in the Northern Crater; divest of coat and pauldrons, clad only in black pants and boots, masamune resting like a faithful companion at his side. “You know I am never far from you.” 

“I’m dreaming.” Cloud scowls, deeply unimpressed that this man has found his way into his dreams at last. “And I don’t want to dream about you. Go away.” 

He concentrates, concentrates – and wakes up in his bedroll, alone, under the stars. Glancing to his left he sees First Tsurugi, and exhales, slow and even. He doesn’t go back to sleep, though. He watches the stars fade and the sun rise, watches the world wake up around him. 

***

Cloud is naked, spread out on the blankets and he’s warm, so warm, he’s _ hot _ like he’s rolled into the fire he thought banked. There are hands on him, calloused from years handling a blade. They move down his body with practiced familiarity and Cloud moans; the fingers that wrap around his cock are sure and strong, stroking with the right pressure, the right speed, to make him writhe. 

A dream, of course. But a welcome one, tonight. Cloud arches up beneath the skillful touches, throat bared as a hot mouth teases at his neck, nipping and sucking, making him shiver. He reaches up, fingers tangled in long thick hair, and Cloud thinks _ Vincent _? 

That’s new. Not surprising, but new. 

As it continues, Cloud notices there’s something odd about the way he’s being touched; a cold, clinical consideration in the caresses that makes him understand _ this is not Vincent _. Cloud notices the hair in his fingers is silver, and then the man on top of him raises his head and Cloud stares into a familiar jade gaze, sees the knowing smirk on that cruel mouth, and feels cold all the way to his core. 

“I don’t want you here,” Cloud says, pulling Sephiroth’s hair, hard, wanting to see pain flash across those beautiful, hateful features. “I told you. Stay out of my dreams.” 

“No,” Sephiroth murmurs, lowering his head, mouthing again at Cloud’s neck. His kisses feel like ice, his touch a loathsome thing, poison-tipped. 

Cloud is so hard he hurts. 

“You’re – not real,” Cloud pants, head tossing. His fingers dig into Sephiroth’s shoulders, and unlike the men he takes to bed when he’s awake, he doesn’t have to be careful. His strength won’t be too much, and if he hurts Sephiroth -- _ good. _“And I -- I never wanted you –” 

“Liar,” Sephiroth coos, silken voice slick and soft against his ear. “You’ve always wanted me. Why else do you chase me to the ends of the world and back?” 

“To kill you.” Cloud’s hands twist in Sephiroth’s hair, shards of glass between his fingers. He arches up, fucking the fist that is so tight, so good, around his cock. He’s close, closer than he ever is in dreams when it’s Zack and leave it to Sephiroth to take even that. “I don’t want you, I hate you, _ hate you _ –” 

“I know,” Sephiroth says, kissing Cloud’s mouth. “I hate you too, Cloud. But you will never be free of me. Send me to death all you want, but remember that what you have made me… there is no darkness in which you can hide. I can follow you, always. _ And I will. _” 

Cloud snarls and reaches to his side for the sword; he doesn’t notice or care which one it is, as long as it’s there. His fingers close around the hilt and he drives it straight through his rival’s heart...right as he comes, hot and wet and messy, in Sephiroth’s hand. 

Sephiroth laughs and blood-black pours from his mouth, seeps like tears from his cat-slit eyes.

The sky above is starless-dark. Right before he wakes up, Cloud sees something bright and burning at the edge of his vision, hurtling through the empty, inky black sky like -- 

_ A meteor. _

***

Cloud wakes up with a start, his face wet and his hand sticky, and knows there will no longer be safety in dreams. The stars have faded as dawn brightens the sky, and Cloud can _ feel _him, the edges of him everywhere in the air like electricity.

The fire is banked, the embers cold. Cloud eases his left hand out from the blankets, humiliated and ashamed at what he’s done. 

His right hand is closed around First Tsurugi’s hilt. His face is wet with tears and he’s afraid to wipe them away, afraid to see his skin turned black. His body is satisfied from the release he hadn’t wanted. 

Sex and death and pain and tears, and Cloud knows what it means; that somewhere, his old enemy is rising just like the dawn. 

There is nothing left but to go and find him. Find him, kill him, and send him back to the dark. 

  
  
  



End file.
